


Saint Agent Margaret, Defend Us In Battle

by SearchingforSerendipity



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America - All Media Types, Christian Scripture & Lore, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Feminist Themes, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, peggy is the archangel michael
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-23 10:12:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8323909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: "My brother Michael died in the war," she says, and it is not a lie. Michael was kin to Margaret Carter, as much as a hand can be to the body, the mind to a thought. Michael fought in a war and died.Peggy Carter had lost a brother. His name was not Michael.   In which Peggy is the Archangel Michael, terrible and terribly alone.





	1. Chapter 1

 

 

 

  
Angie invites her to come to the church with her. Peggy smiles and tries to make it kind, tries not to look bitter.

"I haven't prayed in a long time, my dear. You go."

She goes. Peggy stays behind in her room, sharpening knives.

 

  

The Angels did not pray. It was unnecessary; to pray would be to call out to a find, a sibling, tap a shoulder and ask a question. Angels were not, as a whole, in the business of making questions, not because they would not be answered, but because there was nothing else to know, so they thought.

She asked. She questioned. What was a Commander good for, if they do not known what orders to give, what answers to perpetuate?

Her trust in the Father was not an unquestioning thing. It was righteous. That does not mean it was right. There is a difference. There is a difference between obedience and belief.

 

  
"My brother Michael died in the war," she says, and it is not a lie. Michael was kin to Margaret Carter, as much as a hand can be to the body, the mind to a thought. The reflection in the mirror is inanimate, is an impression, ghost-like. Michael fought in a war and died.

Peggy Carter lost a brother. His name was not Michael.

 

 

  
There was nothing angelic about Steve Roger.

The fair hair, the blue eyes: all man-made concepts of divinity, so similar to the men in the enemy army. Steve was all human, to the mud on his worn booths to the charcoal under his fingers, the sweat that caught in the line between his brows. His mind was sharp, not in intelligence but in edge, like a weapon of war hungry for purpose. Not blood. He was a man of weak flesh and cracked bones, scars crowding together in his knuckles, but he was not blood thirsty. He was thirsty for justice.

His reflection was all his own, but Peggy caught the proud turn of his chin and wondered, sometimes. She spent a night awake, looking at the night, refusing to look up, and in the morning she told Howard to give him a shield.

Steve Rogers did not pray, not since his mother passed. He prayed when James Barnes fell from the train. Peggy heard it, bitter words cold with grief. She chases the sound of it and finds him grieving at a bar, hoarding guilt close to his chest, salt on his cheeks.

She tells him to stop blaming himself. A friend deserves the respect of making his own decisions.

Steve listens, but something terrible in him settles into a winter without a thaw. The Valkyrie goes down, down.

Free will, free choice, free fall. Was the not how it all started?

 

 

"What do you think of these human creatures? Tell me true, brother," Lucifer (Samael, Samael, that was who he was first and last to Michael).

Michael answered truthfully. They knew not what else to do: the Firstborn did not lie. It would not set a good example.

"Adam is weak, more clay than flesh. I am not much impressed, but he has potential. This Lilith, I like her best, I think. She is smarter, and bolder. But we will see." Michael did not shrug, but looked at Samel wonderingly. "Father has asked us to love them. What else matters?"

Samael tilted his chin and did not look away. He was more accustomed to lying, and Michael blind to it. Samael did not lie, he only took the truth and gave it a new shape at his own image. "Nothing. I simply wanted your opinion. You know how dearly I respect it."

 

 

  
Men look at Peggy up and down, and she remembers (faintly, like a childhood story, a parable, a dream more impression than image, half-remembered) when the Fist Man looked at her and looked down, ashamed and afraid.

Lilith had looked up and up and at her eyes. They had nodded at each other, in respect. That had been a beginning as well, thought neither had known it.

Men look Peggy up and down until she teaches them to look down. Peggy looks forward, not up, not down. There is nothing for her to look at, heaven-wards.

Her hands itch for a swords and she clasp a gun, knife, a badge. Rank and respect and reckoning, calluses of every shape. She rarely obeys her superiors; she has no superior worth the name.

It could be an image of worship: St. Margaret, Patroness of Unseen Warriors, and beneath a woman dressed in scarlet, walking against a crowd of men in black. It is good enough for a prayer of its own.

 

 

  
HYDRA is not made of demons. It is men that build the bunkers and secret places where wickedness grasps tight, men that obey and order and shoot and kill and raze to the ground. There is no such thing as demons, not the way men like to paint them.

Peggy goes on a mission to Siberia, in search of a Red Room where young girls are taken to turn into monsters. There in the snow (a white not unlike the one who swallowed James Barnes), there in the withered husk of a garden, in the ruins of an abandoned city, was a tree. It was brown and thin and the boughs were weighted down with frost.

The bark twisted and turned, reshaped itself. Peggy touched her gun. She thought of a shield. She thought of swords ringing out, thrown aside. A thud, right after the fall. Metal falls so oddly in good soil. It makes no sound at all, here in the snow.

She leaves the snake sleeping. There are girls to save.

 

 

Samael the beloved, Samael the Brother died. Lucifer is who touched the ground. Satan is what they called him.

Michael cast him out and looked down at his fall and cried out to the Father,

"Why did You made me do it? Why did You order me so, Lord?"

And the Father answered. "Why did you obey?"

And Michael tossed his sword and his faith and jumped. Somewhere, Lilith looked up and snorted. In the Garden, Adam felt free to trick and lie to Eve.

The snake, lazy, coiled tighter around the truck and hissed.

 

 

There was an apple of knowledge. God made the seed and let it grow because it was too much for him to hold, too much knowing. Adam, who was young and bold snd brash, was told not to eat the apple. Angels, who knew all of respect and obedience and knew nothing of hunger and knowledge, did not think to eat the apple.

God told Eve nothing. God remembered Lilith with little fondness.

All the race of men were Eve and Adam's children. Not Lilith and Adam, or Eve and Lilith. Eve was the mother. Eve was who buried Abel and cried for Cain. Eve was who ate the apple, not Adam.

I repeat: Eve was the one who ate the apple of knowledge.

 

 

And Lilith was the one who ran away before she was cast out. Is that not wisdom as well? Is she not brave, and sad, and strong? Is she not worthy of worship?

Michael thought so. Peggy thought of Eve and loved her, but Lilith, she wanted to be Lilith.

 

  
Angie's name is Angela. She-Angel or Of the angel, a promise of protection from birth. She has a smile like a starless dawn, all sun and blooming things. Peggy lives and fights, eats every pie Angie puts in front of her including apple.

Angie isn't Eve or Lilith or the apple. Steve would like her, perhaps, but there's no way to know. She is Angie, uniquely Angie, and one days she looks up and finds there is a promise she wants to fulfill.

"Will you come to Church with me, Peggs?" Angie asks. The have been house mates for some time, friend for longer. Her mouth is pursed into a tentative smile, her hands behind her back so she doesn't reach out.

Peggy thinks of her knives (never swords, never shields), in the fake bottom of her purse. She thinks of the reports to be written and the monsters to be slain, the way siblings touch each other's shoulders to ask a question.

  
"I'll walk you there," she compromises, and Angie looks up at her and smiles.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

Peggy remembers, not in the heat of the battle or during Sunday homily, not late at night kneeling and echoing her mother.

This is when she remembers: It's a Friday. Her mother is dead, and the sun is spring-kind. The english roses are flushed with blushes and the living are red around the eyes. Peggy's mother is white. Peggy wears black.

This is how she remembers: her mother is dead, cold and dead and the casket is open and she isn't wearing her best pearls because they are around Peggy's neck, cold and heavy against the juncture of her breast. Her father and uncles carry the casket, even though Peggy would give the pearls away for the chance to hold her mother up, if for only one time. Amanda Grace Carter had never needed anyone to hold her up in life, not her husband and not her brothers. 

There is dust. It coats the wood of the casket with a thin layer, and then they lay the stone above. The priest closes his book and the mourners move back to the Carter's house. It is done.

Peggy flees. It is her only cowardly act: she has a duty to her family and a responsibility to her grief and she flees, follows the corpse road from the graveyard to the church's backyard and then down, down, deep into the forest. There is a meadow, or the impression of something like a meadow, an opening from the shade, and there is a new thrumming in her chest, her back, her hands, and the road never ends, it widens into impossible --

This is what she remembers: silence, and then a song like a homecoming.

 

 

Of course, there is no homecoming. There is no home anymore, not for her. The being she is, has been since her birth, since the birth of all things, is an exile. She can't even complain properly, since it was her choice. 

"Bugger," young Peggy Carter says, sitting in a bench behind the church she was once baptized. "Fucking bloody fuck. Damn God and all his obedient little toy soldier to Hell, and let the Devil do unto them as he wishes to do unto me."

As far as blasphemy go, it's very satisfying. Swearing as a whole is both very suggestive and has the added benefit of invoking most of the beings she's angry at in a very neat, descriptive manner. Except herself, but that's a different sort of anger. 

After that, she goes through the motions of humanhood while hiding an existential crisis of - quite literally - biblical proportions. It helps that Peggy Carter the girl is at a transition point towards womanhood, and so polity society brushes away any changes in her character as a matter of growing older and dealing woth grief. It is not a lie, even, though Peggy has a great deal of fun experiencing the thrill of saying unthruths and keeping secrets an archangel had no liberty to keep. That her loss is that of a Fther and a Brother and all her Brethren does not make any less of the grief for Grace Carter, whom she had loved and adored genuinely.

She considers ressurecting her for two minutes, then brushes the idea away. A fallen archangel is not the same as a prophet, much less a messiah, and the kast thing the remaining Carter's needed were a cult of their sweet, solemn Peggy. Description is far preferable, in this as in most things, even if it is a new and learned skill. An Archangel had only to obey the word from Above and order the ranks Below. Without question, without fault, without the concept of faltering; what is faith if not eternal?

 

 

(No, that is not right. It is hope that springs eternal, and faith that must be tested. But that is for humans, made at God's image, and angels were made without inspiration. Without liberty, for what good is a soldier-slave if they have to search for their devotion?

And yet. The Father did not stop Lucifer from Falling, but neither did he hinder Michael's choice. And if it was a choice, what else was voluntary?

What else was she responsible for?)

 

 

That is not to say that Michael had had no need for choices, before. It was not so dire as all that; they did have a certain measure of personality, destinguishing traits, and the Second Made of the Lord had been a force of cosmus and light unique in their essence, their oresence in the Song. Peggy Carter, however, had to choose what to weat and what to say and was restricted in her choices by a code of rules that applied to her position in society in mean, constricted ways. 

All that can be aaid of those years is that she tries to pretend to be a girl like any other, less starkight and dark matter and more pale smiles and soft hands. She suceeds, mostly, or would if she could bring herself to confort entirely. Guilt keeps her to this human family, beloved and loving in their way, guilt keeps her silent and smothered and teying to remake herself into less of a soldier. This was not why she Fell, but it is how she learns to Rise, so it is just as important. 

Then there is a grim, righteous moment when she reads the newspaper front page declarong the beggining of the war, and Peggy thinks, _I am a girl and I am a soldier and I am of war_.

it is her choice. It is the most free she has felt all her existence. 

 

 

 Examples of lies she gets away with: 

–Margaret Carter has a brother named Michael. That is blatantly untrue, and only the fact that she buried her own file in paperwork gives it any credibility. Amanda and Harrison Carter have only the one daughter. Michael is the excuse she gives others to get herself into the front lines, the explination for the angry thing that grows out of her grief. 

–Her hair is naturally curly. Or unnaturally, depending on how one considered it. No curlers necessary, thank you very much, and if this was not what He had in mind for an archangel’s supernatural abilities, but then again there were many worse whims Peggy could be indulging in. 

–She would rather shield the innocent than slay the guilty.  

 

 

War is never glorious. That is not news for Peggy. The blatant disrespect is. 

Technically speaking, she had never been a mere cadet. Samael had been older and she had had to report to him on some few important matters (Lilith's creation, the protection of the Garden, the growing of the Tree) but in all thing was Michael to be obeyed.  

Bletchley Park is loud and busy and no one would hear her commands if she cared to say them. Peggy marks the days by the whispers in the halls when men deem her invisible and and so deaft, by the lines of code and the focus of a dire mystery. No one expects brilliant out of her and for that she is excellent at it, better than excellent; she understands the malleability of language in the memory of the rush of light and pressure and energy. German codes have nothing on Gabriel's babbling. 

(Oh, and she misses Gabriel so dearly, and Raphael's steadiness, and Samael Samael _Samael_. 

And Father, but that is a raging wound she keeps away from.)

They ask her if she wants to go and fish secrets at another hallways, other streets. She accepts without hesitation. They give her a gun and gawk when she hits nine out of ten bulleye. She trains herself to perfection. For all that she has an instinct for all weapons and knowledge of war-fare that expands human comprehension, her body is soft and slow. She runs, types reports and reads old files. 

She reads Milton as well, Thomas Moore and Kant and Plato, but Sapho was well, Virginia Wolf and Elizabeth Barret Browning. Nietzche makes her bristle with rage and clean away angry tears. Mary Shelley keeps her awake until tye wee hours of the norning thinking about creation. Austen makes her laugh. 

Her mother's Bible is left unopened. She leaves it behind with her trunk at some musty hotel when fleeing from a blown cover in Vienna. 

Humans die and Peggy (who is Michael who is kneeling before her Father and swearing to love and protect the children of man) throws up the first time. But not the second. Huambs die by her orders, by her hands, by her side. The first time she hears a prayer she cuts it off mid plea. There is no repentance for that. 

They call her Agent, begudgingly, bitterly. She obeys orders and argues with superiors and never, never stops doubting.

That is how she finds her worth: like molten stell taking the shape of a sword, one sweltering strike at a time. 

 

 

Example of one weak lie: 

–Peggy Carter does not believe in God. She does. She even loves Him. She just doesn't trust His judgement. 

 

That is quite well. She is perfectly capable of writing her own gospel. 

**Author's Note:**

> the title is from the first verses of saint michael's prayer: saint archangel michael, defend us in battle.


End file.
